Carter has a brother, Philip Dutartre Carter (born 1939), former publisher of the Delta Democrat-Times, of Greenville, the newspaper started by their father and later publisher of the Vieux Carré Courier and financier of the weekly paper Gambit, both of New Orleans. Another brother, Thomas Hennen Carter (1945–1964), killed himself while playing Russian roulette.

Carter wrote the book The South Strikes Back. He won the Sigma Delta Chi National Profession Journalism Society Award for Editorial Writing in 1961.[2]

In the 1960s, Carter was involved in civil rights movement, both editorially and in political action. In 1968, he co-chaired the "Loyal Democrats of Mississippi" that replaced Mississippi's previously all- white delegation to the Democratic National Convention, but later criticized the Delta Ministry (part of the biracial coalition) in his editorials.[3]

Since then, Carter has lectured at universities all over the country and continued to do freelance work for the television and print media. His most recent position is University Professor of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.[5]

Carter contributed to After Snowden: Privacy, Secrecy, and Security in the Information Age, published in May 2015.